This turned up in the mail for me last week - the official results magazine for last year's New York City Marathon. And my official placing: 21,953 out of 50,401 who finished hehe. To put that into perspective, if there were just 100 runners, I would have placed about 44th. Incidentally, the person who finished second-last was a 91-year-old female with a time of 9:50:21. If I can complete a marathon in less than ten hours at the age of 91, I'll be happy :)

This was shot by a friend this morning who lives across the East River from us in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (where that huge fire was last weekend). He lives in an apartment building right on the river and has this view from his balcony - not bad! Anyway, spot all the ice in the river down there. In the last two weeks New York has had some of the coldest temperatures I've ever experienced, which is all well and good until the novelty wears off, which it has hehe. I don't know how people put up with this for six months every year; some nut jobs I know even look forward to it!

The date is set: this July 1st, Kristina and I will be leaving New York after three incredible years here. The winters are a bit dismal but I'm going to miss this city like crazy. The chaos, the non-stop atmosphere, and simply the aura of this place - I absolutely love it! Unfortunately, for all its thrills, New York isn't a place I would like to settle permanently and do the family thing. With that in mind, the time is nigh to move on and start looking for a more permanent home. And with that in mind, upon leaving New York Kristina and I will be embarking on a four-month road trip covering the bulk of the United States, plus a bit of Canada thrown in for good measure, to give this foreigner the opportunity to really experience this country I now call home. Unfortunately there isn't enough time in the day to include the southeast corner of the country on this trip, but some of it I've already seen and the rest will be on the to-do list for another time. More details on the road trip to follow in due course, but after 15,000'ish miles on the road we'll be finishing up in Austin, Texas, an hour north of Kristina's home city of San Antonio, to set down some new (and perhaps permanent) roots.

Valentine's Day, and frankly I could think of no better way for Kristina to spend it than here: the American Kennel Club's annual Meet the Breeds. (Kristina wants a dog, badly :) The annual two-day Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show kicks off on Monday in New York, and Meet the Breeds is an opportunity for the public to meet and learn about some of the dogs.

Many of the dogs were clearly tired, having been up since ungodly-o'clock this morning for the drive into New York if they weren't already staying here. On top of that, having thousands of random idiots in your face and touching you all day was no doubt a test of patience.

Some just couldn't be arsed at all hehe.

Be that as it may, the more energetic dogs were loving the attention and mayhem, and Kristina set about making friends immediately hahaha!

There were several dozen breeds on show, including small fluffy dogs...

Big fluffy dogs...

Dogs that have a hard time seeing where they're going...

And the usual favourites like the beagles, the labs, and the golden retrievers here.

This is President Obama's breed of choice - the Portuguese water dog.

And of course the Queen's breed of choice, the Welsh corgi hehe.

She could have opted for an English bulldog also.

But there one breed of dog I was really hoping to see in person - the bergamasco hahaha!

Sure enough there were a few of them here. If not for his little neckerchief I wouldn't have a clue where his head is.

Yup, that's a funny lookin' dog!

This one was wearing a kimono. I have no idea why, but some of these dogs' owners are nuts.

The key was to get in, snap a photo, and get out, else risk having your ear chewed off for the next ten minutes hehe.

This man, is gay.

When the time (and living arrangement) is right, we'll get ourselves a pooch :) It was never going to happen in New York though. Dogs need space, and preferably a yard; our little studio apartment has neither of those things.

Afterwards I took Kristina home and did the same thing ;)

A couple weeks ago this was snow, left over from the big dumping we got during that blizzard last month. Now it's turned to solid ice.

And a couple weeks ago this was a snowman. Now he's an iceman hehe (and looks to have been visited by a lot of dogs).

In the days since that blizzard, the high temperature has only got above freezing twice. The snow therefore never completely melted away and what's left are these huge mounds of ice all over the place. As if parking wasn't difficult enough in this city, now drivers have to contend with this. Meanwhile, these freezing temperatures show no sign of letting up, and in fact are only getting colder. Temperature-related records are being broken all over the area at the moment, and New York City last night had its coldest temperature in over a decade with fierce wind chills to boot. With that being the case, and because I like to experience these things for myself firsthand, I went out for a bike ride at midnight last night hahaha!

After braving the wind chill this was my first stop at about 12:30am - celebrity spotting at The Plaza Hotel, a luxury hotel and apartment building adjacent to Central Park. Saturday Night Live, a weekly New York-based "late-night live television sketch comedy and variety show", celebrated its 40th birthday last night with dozens of big-name celebs. The after-party was held here, but by the time I arrived so too had everyone else. I did see Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones however.

From there I headed to the Bryant Park fountain again. It was looking pretty impressive when I last came to see it about a month ago, at which point it was still running (barely), but now they've finally decided to turn it off hehe. On that occasion it was 8 degrees Fahrenheit (-13 C) which matched (for the third time) my record for the coldest temperature I've cycled in.

But I've certainly broken that now! At 1am it was 3 F (-16 C) and the wind chill was -17 F (-27 C) with sustained wind speeds of 20mph (32km/h). By the way, the temperature in a typical home freezer is 0 F (-18 C). I had four layers on top including two jackets, three layers over my legs, three pairs of gloves, three pairs of (wool) socks, a fleece around my neck, a scarf over my face, and a beanie under my helmet. While my body was fine, and despite three thick layers, my fingers and toes were not happy hehe. Incidentally, the hottest temperature I've ever cycled in is 110 F (43 C) in Texas shortly after first arriving there a few years ago. That's a temperature difference from coldest to hottest of 107 clicks on the Fahrenheit scale and 59 clicks on the Celsius scale. Love it :)

Whether you love him or hate him (or are somewhere in the middle), there's no denying President Obama is one cool dude, as evidenced (among many other things) by this video here. At any rate, he's a lot more likeable than Bush was, and less of a moron.

I know I keep banging on about it, but frankly there's little else to bang on about at the moment. The whole eastern half of the country is being punished by another one of these so-called arctic blasts, producing more record-low temperatures overnight and into this morning's commute. As you can see by this trusty thermometer just a couple blocks down from my office that I keep taking photos of, it was a nipple-erection-inducing 4 F (-15.5 C) for my cycle in this morning, and despite the nuts I've mentioned previously who proclaim to look forward to and enjoy the winter season, no one appeared to be enjoying this.

Meanwhile, further north in Upstate New York on the Canadian border, Niagara Falls has all but completely frozen over hehe. The first time I visited the falls also happened to be a February, and they were looking pretty icy then too but nothing like this. Oh well, summer's coming.

This is the Hudson River as seen from the George Washington Bridge, connecting Manhattan and New Jersey. The huge sheets of ice floating along it should give you some idea of the temperatures we've been punished with this winter. So why the hell were we here? Well it wasn't actually too cold today - just a tick below freezing in fact, which all things considered felt pretty nice hehe. We'd just come back from New Jersey after test driving a potential car for the road trip this summer.

This was it by the way, a 2015 Ford Fusion. As I do, I've researched the hell out of the mid-size sedan market, and this is really the only one that has ticked all of the boxes. Obviously there's no point buying a new car for just a four-month road trip, but I really don't want someone else's junk and risk it crapping out on us during that trip. Furthermore, in Texas (or wherever we end up) a car is virtually an absolute necessity so whatever vehicle we get will be kept for at least the next decade or more. In fact, it's been a whole decade since I last owned a car; looking forward to that again! :)

A friend of ours (who used to work with Kristina) just got back from a trip to South Africa. Because I'm a nice guy, I lent him my old DSLR and offered to touch up some of his snaps. Here are a few examples. Kristina really wants to go to South Africa herself, and although I wouldn't turn an opportunity down, I've never been as interested in it (or Africa in general) as I am other parts of the world. One day maybe :)

March, finally! This February has been New York City's coldest in 80 years and the third-coldest since records began (some time in the 1800s), with an average temperature as recorded by the weather station in Central Park of 24.1 F (-4.4 C). That also makes it the ninth-coldest month ever recorded in the city. The rivers are frozen, the Statue of Liberty is frozen, and we're all pretty over it now hehe. The city won't properly start to thaw out and the trees start to bloom for at least another month, but the days are getting noticably longer and it can only get better from here. And next winter we'll be in Texas, so we won't care :)

After much research and subsequent searching, this is it: a brand-spanking-new 2015 Ford Fusion (known as a Mondeo in New Zealand and Australia). This will be our beast for our upcoming four-month road trip around the US and Canada when we permanently leave New York this summer. Although we're still four months away from that, the 2015 model year is nearing its end and so the availability of 2015 Fusions on the market is starting to dry up. When you're as picky as I am your choices are even fewer, and what you're looking at here is exactly what I was looking for in terms of model, colour, engine, and vehicle options. In fact, this is the only one of its kind that I could find within a 300-mile radius of New York (and thankfully it was just a short train ride away in New Jersey). With that being the case, there's no time like the present! We only put a deposit down on it today so the dealership would hold it until we pick it up next month, after which it will be spending the following three months in a rented garage, minus a few weekend trips no doubt :)

There's no denying it's pretty, but we're all ready to see some green on the trees rather than white! After 24 hours of pouring rain and above-freezing temperatures, much of the snow-turned-ice on the ground that has been plaguing the city for several weeks actually melted away, only to be thoroughly replaced again overnight hehe. The weather nuts are saying this should be the last big dumping before temperatures slowly but surely start to rise. And not a moment too soon - the New York City Half Marathon is next weekend which both Kristina and I are running, and it's gonna suck if it like this!

I would dearly love to say these photos are my own, but alas :) A couple months ago I came across a series of aerial photos of New York City, shot from the side of a helicopter at 7,500 feet by a photographer on assignment for Men's Health Magazine. It was an article about psychology, and the photographer always thought that from a high altitude the streets looked like brain synapses. Hey, whatever - these photos are stunning! At this altitude, they were actually flying above aircraft that were on approach to and taking off from the city's three airports - very cool! The shot on the left is looking north along the island of Manhattan with Brooklyn and Queens to its right and New Jersey to its left (The Bronx is way off in the distance somewhere). The big dark patch towards the top is Central Park - we live somewhere to the right of that. The shot in the middle is looking south over the lower third of Manhattan, with the southern tip of Central Park and Midtown Manhattan in the foreground, and Lower Manhattan and the One World Trade Center building at the tip of the island. Way off in the distance is Staten Island where the New York City Marathon starts from - damn I ran a long way! The shot on the right is One World Trade Center overlooking the 9/11 Memorial, where the former Twin Towers once stood.

Times Square, nicknamed the "Crossroads of the World" - a five-block intersection where Seventh Avenue and Broadway meet.

And this here is a guts of Midtown Manhattan where I work (the building on the bottom-right with the little red neon logo on the side), with the lights of Times Square in the background. Plenty more of these photos, and more details of the shoot itself for any photographers out there, are here, and a gallery of them all are here.

After my marathon effort in the New York City Marathon last year, Kristina was somehow inspired to do a run of her own. So, we both entered the lottery for the New York City Half Marathon some months ago, and low and behold both our names were pulled out of the hat :) The route starts in Central Park (conveniently just down the road from us) and finishes down the bottom of Manhattan, taking in Midtown Manhattan, Times Square, and the Hudson River along the way. Having run two marathons I already know what I'm capable of in a half, so I'm going to act as Kristina's one-man support crew for this, and photographer hehe. Tomorrow's the (half) big day, after which it'll be another week of sore legs.

As mentioned yesterday, Kristina and I ran the New York City Half Marathon today. Here's Kristina, full of beans and raring to go...

Yours truly, sporting my New York City Marathon medal from last year (for the photo :)...

And here's everyone else in the starting corrals in Central Park, ready for 13.1 miles (21.1kms) of knee-punishing fun!

It wasn't the nicest of days, but given Central Park has been buried under at least a foot of snow up until just a few days ago, and given it poured with rain all day yesterday, we'll take it! Anyway, after a short wait, we crossed the starting line and were off!

Central Park made up almost the entire first half of the route (it's a friggin' big park!). The park contains four major hills that we had to tackle - two of which are total bastards (I know them well from my marathon training last summer). Here's the first bastard hill...

...and here's the second. It looks quite flat in this shot, but it ain't!

There was high demand at the drink stations after that.

We eventually left the park, crossed the half-way point, and headed south along Seventh Avenue and into Times Square. From this point on it was all downhill and flat, with a tailwind to boot. Lovely.

There's me on the telly, taking a photo of myself ;)

From Times Square we headed west along 42nd Street and down to the Hudson River.

The final stretch along Manhattan's western edge heading down to its southern tip was exactly five miles in length, and one-by-one folk started to hit the wall and resort to walking.

But somehow Kristina managed to truck on for the whole lot - what a trooper!

Looking up at the new One World Trade Center building in Lower Manhattan. Quite an impressive sight that!

With one more of these damn miles to go, Kristina's run had turned into a power-walking, power-hobbling hybrid hehe, but she was still battling on!

Two hours, 48 minutes, and 35 seconds after we started, we crossed the finish line :)

Just another medal to add to the five million others she has for swimming.